Fantasy Fiction

Chameleon’s Morrow is the first book in a fantasy series called Twilight of the Gods that Sid Prise will be publishing over the next several years. Though a published author of three books with the UK-based Chipmunka Publishing, Sid has chosen to self-publish this series, primarily for the greater freedom in copyrighting the self-published form allows him. Under the Creative Commons license that Sid has chosen, the Attribution-Sharealike-Commercial license, anyone anywhere in the world can create their own versions of this story, or tell their own, new stories in the worlds of T’luria, and sell them for their own profit–as long as the work is licensed under the same terms.

Sid hopes to challenge the conventional way we think of stories–not as the personal, jealously-guarded property of one author, but as the common property of all who read and imagine them. Stories that live in our minds and hearts are always being interpreted, and reinterpreted–this is what makes a story live. The Creative Commons license removes the outmoded legal barriers to this process–and opens the worlds in Chameleon’s Morrow and Twilight of the Gods to all.

This takes these books out of the realm of libraries and bookstores, and puts it in a far more egalitarian context: the myth-making we can all share round our campfire.

Chameleon’s Morrow is the story of the Elfin warrior and sorceress Aurelia of Rasil’yon. It is filled with true-to-life battle scenes and explicit, open celebrations of all forms of sexuality. From her beginnings in a small Elfin thorp in the Great Western Forests of the Continent of T’luria, to her adventures in the cold Northern Tundra, to the capitol of her enemies, the High Dwarves of Kharahdjo, to her life as a sex-worker-priestess in the Heartland and the Humanish city of Gavinton, Aurelia grows in her faith in the Goddess of Revolution, Pa’aan’s’kyy, and confronts a world of racism, sexism, and homophobia. She must face her own Elfish racism, learning hard lessons about war, forced when a prisoner to turn to orcs and other ancestral enemies for friendship. Throughout, she searches for the Codex, a powerful tome her Uncle Aurel died trying to find. She is singled out by the Dragon Mek’laar, who attempts to use her in a rite to bring the God of Madness back into the world—a rite that will only be thwarted if Aurelia can resist the lure of goddesshood and embrace her own mortality and imperfection. Will she reject the temptation of immortality? Will she conquer the world of racism and religious intolerance, but outside and inside herself? Or will she succumb to the vision of a war of all against all—a Twilight of the Gods?

The seven-book series Twilight of the Gods will follows the ongoing battle between the God of Madness, X’pa’aan’oughk, and the people of T’luria and many other worlds. Aurelia’s vision of a war between the peoples of her world, driven by their Gods deranged by X’pa’aan’oughk gradually comes to fruition. The series takes us through many years of T’lurian history, through a world much closer to ours, and finally to a place and time where the Gods of T’luria and the Gods of Earth live and die. By its end, the fight against Madness must be reframed to reveal a deeper understanding of Its origins, and how It can help us as well as hurt us.